Choose Privacy Week: May 1-7, 2017

Start learning how you can protect yourself this May during Choose Privacy Week at the library. Better Business Bureau and the Library Freedom Project will visit and present on various topics, including controlling your privacy online and protecting yourself against scams. Both programs are free and open to the public.

Protecting Your Privacy Online

This program has been canceled. It will be held in May 2018.

Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project will be teaching the basics of keeping your online data as safe as possible. Learn about some of the threats to privacy that exist in the online sphere, as well as tips and tools that can help — password management, safer browsing, blocking web trackers, encrypted texting, and general strategies for safer online behavior. This is an increasingly important discussion in our modern, ever-evolving society.

Meet Our Speakers:

Amy Schram has been with Better Business Bureau since 2011 and is responsible for educating the public at large and fostering the business to consumer relationship. Prior to joining BBB Amy was traveling throughout New England serving as a Motivational Speaker for Monster’s Making It Count Programs. She has previously performed in the Entertainment Department of the Walt Disney World Company and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emerson College.

Robin Putman currently works for the MA Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation serving as it’s Research and Special Projects Manager. In her role within Consumer Affairs, Robin conducts extensive outreach in dozens of communities throughout the Commonwealth, planning, coordinating, scheduling, and participating in a wide variety of events to provide consumers with information, education, and resources.

Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, and a core contributor to The Tor Project. Alison is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and giant multinational corporations.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a nonprofit organization focused on advancing marketplace trust, consisting of 112 independently incorporated local BBB organizations in the United States and Canada, coordinated under the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB) in Arlington, Virginia.

The Library Freedom Project is a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to address the problems of surveillance by making real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. By teaching about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, the Project hopes to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the communities they serve.